I am extremely pleased to announce that BIOSCI is now providing WWW
access to all bionet newsgroups through its Web site at www.bio.net!!!
To use this service connect to our URL
http://www.bio.net
and then click on the "Access the BIOSCI/bionet Newsgroups" hyperlink.
David Mack, the BIOSCI systems administrator at the U.S. BIOSCI node,
has done an excellent job using the hypermail program from Enterprise
Integration Technologies to make both current and archived BIOSCI
messages available through the World Wide Web.
Hypermail converts all e-mail addresses in the messages to mailto:
URLs. As long as your Web browser is correctly configured to send
e-mail, you can not only read these messages, you can also send either
public replies to the newsgroup posting address (present on each
message To: line) or private replies to the poster (address on each
message's From: line). By selecting the appropriate browser option,
you may also be able to include text in your reply from the message to
which you are responding.
The hypermail archive message headers are threaded by default, but
messages can also be displayed chronologically or sorted by author or
subject line. This capability gives you, in effect, a threaded
newsreader through the Web.
All messages posted to the lists are still distributed by e-mail and
USENET as usual. However they are now also added to the hypermail
archives typically within 20 minutes of posting (a delay was added to
avoid file locking problems during periods of heavy use).
The new hypermail archive gives you the advantages of USENET without
requiring a local news server!! You can keep your personal mail file
uncluttered now by using this system instead of e-mail. If you have
had problems in the past with new bionet groups not getting
established in your local USENET news system, weep no more!! The
latest messages will always be here at net.bio.net and all you will
need is your Web browser to read and/or post to any of the newsgroups.
We will also soon be offering far more WAIS indexes as you will see
from browsing the new system. Our goal is to provide, in addition to
our current system-wide BIOSCI index, individual indexes for each
newsgroup!
Although we have done extensive testing, we will not be surprised if
users discover some remaining bugs in the system. Please report any
problems to us at
biosci-help at net.bio.net
This new archive also opens up the possibility of sponsorships for
individual newsgroups. If your organization is interested in helping
support our work through advertising in these WWW forums, i.e.,
displaying your logo - broadcast ads are not allowed, please contact
us at biosci-help at net.bio.net.
This is one of the most exciting developments at BIOSCI in quite some
time. I want to thank David Mack for all of his hard work getting
this system up and running. This entailed many late nights and
weekends of effort to configure our system properly. I would also
like to thank David States at Washington University for calling this
program to our attention several months ago. We had looked at other
software for providing Web access to our services and like this one
the best. Hypermail was developed by Tom Gruber for Enterprise
Integration Technologies (EIT) and later rewritten in C by Kevin
Hughes at EIT. It is available for free from EIT.
I am also pleased to announce that we have recently developed other
software here that makes newsgroup moderation very easy compared to
the old methods. We continue to encourage the discussion leaders of
the low-to-moderate volume newsgroups to consider moderation to
protect your readers against Internet ad spams. Please contact us for
details on implementing this.
Sincerely,
Dave Kristofferson
BIOSCI/bionet Manager
biosci-help at net.bio.net